Twitter and other companies, notably Google, have a policy of notifying a user before responding to a subpoena, or a similar request for records. That gives the user a fair chance to go to court and try and quash the subpoena. That’s a great policy. But it has one fatal flaw. If the records request comes with a gag order, the company can’t notify anyone. And it’s quite routine for law enforcement to staple a gag order to a records request.
That’s what makes Twitter’s move so important. It briefly carried the torch for its users during that crucial period when, because of the gag order, its users couldn’t carry it themselves. The company’s action in asking for the gag order to be overturned sets a new precedent that we can only hope that other companies begin to follow.
12 January 2011
Twitter strikes a blow for freedom
There's quite a lot of talk about "big government" these days, so kudos to Twitter for striking a blow against it and standing up for Wikileaks. Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard | Wired.com:
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5 comments:
Twitter must have done a contextual search and discovered that most of the people who tweet are not extremely conservative. :-)
I'm really glad you blogged about this as it seems to have been passed over by much of the MSM. As the article in Wired pointed out, Twitter chose to defend the consumer (ie. the public) whereas most other sites and corporations have simply fallen into line at the word of the government. Scary times we're living in when you can't even speak your mind about anything from Monsanto to Wikileaks. (just watched Food Inc. last night, a must see)
There's quite a lot of talk about "big government" these days, so kudos to Twitter for striking a blow against it ...
Steve, how can you say that and also support the left? One advocates the other.
James,
What to you mean by "the left"? And what do you mean by "support"?
I'm basically a liberal (politically, that is), and the liberal creed is "the government governs best that governs least".
The thing that interests me about this is that Twitter didn't have to do it, and it must have incolved quite a lot of time and effort and legal expenses, when they would not benefit directly.
James, in essence, Steve is a Classical Liberal politcally. But in a different way than the American conservatives, who also claim to be Classical Liberals.
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